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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the aspiration and illusion in Pan-Asianism discourse in female artist Uemura Shōen's work, Yōkihi (1922). Shōen reconceptualized the genre of bjinga (beautiful women) to combine Buddhism and complex visual references that evoked fluid identities of the female body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the shifting artistic and political discourse in 1920s Japan , and the paradoxical role of women artists through a case study of the female nihonga artist Uemura Shōen's (1875-1949) 1922 painting, Yōkihi (Ch: Yang Guifei). The 8th century Chinese beauty Yang Guife has been a popular subject in Japanese literature, noh drama and painting, who was imagined not only as a beautiful woman, but also as a local Shinto deity and a bodhisattva. Understanding the challenge of renewing a thousand-year old subject, Shōen intentionally depicted Yang in nudity, which was the first time in this subject. In this work, Yang's upper torso was naked, whose sensuality was enhanced by the translucent fabric wrapped around her. The erotic evocation, however, was undermined by her calm facial expression, the posture, and the jewelry accessories, which closely resembled the Yōkihi kannon sculpture in Kyoto. The intension between eroticism and divinity makes this work a visually complicated and ideologically ambiguous work. In the 1920s, Yang became a popular subject again, signaling a broader interest in constructing an East Asian beauty on par with Venus in Europe by using Yang as an example. This new artistic pursuit went hand in hand with the historical fascination with the Tenpyō era and the emergence of Pan-Asian identity. This paper considers the following questions: Why did Shōen renew the image of Yang Guifei with a Buddhist icon? How did this image respond to the increasingly polarized perceptions of China in Japan? This paper addresses the above questions by investigating how artists visualize a national and transnational body during the interwar period.